> Behind the scenes, CEO John Riccitiello shifted 2000 shares last week on 6th September, as noted by Yahoo Finance, which noted this move was part of a trend o

> Behind the scenes, CEO John Riccitiello shifted 2000 shares last week on 6th September, as noted by Yahoo Finance, which noted this move was part of a trend over the past year where the exec has sold more than 50,000 shares in total and bought none. This is normal. Many CEOs are paid primarily in stock. No matter how much you believe in your company, diversification is financially wise, so of course they are always selling stock. Typically they sell every month on a schedule pre-determined months or years in advance. No CEO is ever going to buy their own stock because it would make no financial sense. Reporters looking for clicks love this situation because it means that whenever a company does something that makes people angry, you can always look up the CEO's stock sales and discover that, oh wow, they just sold a bunch of stock in the last month! And they never buy any! The reporter conveniently omits the fact that the CEO has been selling that exact same quantity of stock every single month going back years. Sometimes the reporter gets extra-lucky and the CEO's stock is primarily in class B shares, which must first be converted to class A before sale. So every month, the CEO converts some number of shares to class A, and then immediately sells them. This shows up in financial records as the CEO sold 100% of their class A shares. So the reporter reports: "The CEO just sold ALL their stock last week!" CEOs and other top execs are _not allowed_ to just sell stock on a whim, they have to set up a schedule far in advance. The SEC is quite serious about this. (Now, if you do find that a CEO has sold an _unusually large_ amount of stock compared to their historical schedule, then maybe you have something, but somehow that's never what the reporters are saying...) (BTW 2000 shares of Unity is like ~$80,000. 50,000 shares is ~$2M. The guy apparently receives over $10M of stock per year so these numbers are surprisingly small, he seems to be holding onto most of it: https://www1.salary.com/John-Riccitiello-Salary-Bonus-Stock-Options-for-Unity-Software-Inc.html https://www1.salary.com/John-Riccitiello-Salary-Bonus-Stock-... )